Shopping

Old-fashioned sweetie shops

Ever since Topshop’s flagship store in London’s Oxford Circus introduced a pick’n’mix crammed full of sugary treats designed to top up the sugar levers of over-excited teenagers, all the cool kids have known you’re not anyone unless you have a…

The Style Issue - Trendspotting

Dieny Itoe Clothes Not yet out of college, 23-year-old model and design student Dieny Itoe is hotly tipped for fashion fame. Her sophisticated interpretation of form and fabric earned her the coveted Glasgow 1999 Design Medal last year, and while…

The Style Issue - Music style

With many high street retailers currently stocking just about every item of attire an aspiring indie hipster could dream of – from neon-splattered hoodies to trousers crotch-wrenchingly tight enough to do more for family planning than an entire social…

Shopping Showdown - Glasgow

The Style Issue

Glasgow styles better Kirstin Innes and Sharon Stephen report on the heavily accessorised cheap chic trend-setting of the West Coast Despite the manicured, designer labelled image promoted by the city marketing bureau under the umbrella Glasgow…

Shopping Showdown - Edinburgh

The Style Issue

Capital trends Diana Kiernander considers the mix of the traditional and cutting edge that inspires Edinburgh’s dedicated followers of fashion Edinburgh style should be easy to define. There’s an air of near-perfect designer minimalism among the…

Shopping in London

Something cool For a one-stop shop of new designers Sunday Upmarket (Liverpool Street, sundayupmarket.co.uk) has 140 stalls of accessories, fashion and interiors. Keep an eye out for Maria Helena Spector’s jewellery made from silver, lava and…

Shopping trips

Blow the budget For every traveller who sees haggling as an integral part of any good holiday there are many more who would happily swaddle their first born in giftwrap and hand them to the next passer-by if it meant they never had to play the…

Pamper perfect

Once, your cut and blow dry experience amounted to a cup of coffee and a flick through the latest fashion glossy. But hairdressing has come a long way with today’s super salons offering a brilliant, modern and elegant array of luxury services. A…

Secondhand record shops in Glasgow and Edinburgh

Shopping and I have always had a love-hate relationship. But we put aside our differences for record shopping: that ritualistic, solitary activity that’s at once sombre yet exhilarating. Secondhand records possess the same mystique as old books; they…

Shop - Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop

I’ve picked the worst possible time of the year to interview Julia Walton. It’s 12.30 on a Sunday afternoon, just before Hallowe’en, and the door of Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop is constantly jingling. ‘Yes, it’s definitely our busiest time,’ she says…

Vintage clothes in Glasgow and Edinburgh

Throwing out old clothes can be an emotional task and parting with that ripped pair of jeans you wore every day when you were 19 can be hard, but with a little imagination and some creative stitching, rips, tears and pinching waistlines need no longer…

Shop - Bolshie

Ethical fashion may be being shouted about all over the internet, but Bolshie, Glasgow’s only clothes shop dedicated to ethical, Fairtrade, organic and recycled clothing, is tucked away on a leafy residential street near Glasgow University. It looks a…

Made in Scotland

Think of Scotland’s most famous traditional exports and what comes to mind? While in reality they may now be as diverse as the people living within its boundaries, Scotland still sometimes struggles to escape the clichés – tartan, whisky, misty…

It's playtime

Children's Clothing

Ethical, stylish, alternative, interesting and educational? Kirstin Innes meets the designers behind the saintliest children’s clothing companies in the country

Neil Boorman

To the casual observer, burning £20,000 worth of expensive designer gear to cinders in a central London park might not seem like the wisest of actions. For lifestyle journalist Neil Boorman, this ritualistic, highly public destruction of his worldly…

Life & Style - Shop

That tired old maxim that nobody queues like the British has had a new lease of life this month, with a nasty rash of ‘event shopping’ getting consumers and commentators itchy. They included the launch of Kate Moss’s collection for Topshop and Anya…

Mission in Action Fashion Fundraiser

Mission In Action Fashion Show

Fashion Fundraiser ‘Living in this country, we’ve just got no concept of how hard it is for people out there,’ says Annalese McDermott, director of Edinburgh modelling agency Stolen, and co-founder of the UK branch of Mission in Action. Mission in…

Christopher Kane

Sexy Boy

Imagine you’re a 23-year-old fashion postgraduate from Motherwell. Your work is featured in Vogue in an article on student designers, and then Anna Wintour herself turns up at your degree show. She recommends that you meet Donatella - yes, Versace - and…

Shop - A Sale in Two Cities

Life & Style

Krista Blake and Fleur Macintosh haven’t met. Maybe they should have. Macintosh took over tiny Edinburgh vintage clothing store Godiva as a 23-year-old graduate, and, five years and a change of venue later, it is one of the most original clothing…

Life & Style - Shop

Glasgow styles better

Saville Row, Champs Elyseé, Buchanan Street... Designer labels are to Glasgow what coals once were to Newcastle. As the first ever Glasgow Fashion Week struts its stuff all over George Square, Kirstin Innes speaks to three up and coming young designers…

Miso Funky Market

Sun 18 Mar, Oran Mor, Glasgow; Sat 24 Mar, The Cav

FAIRS 'We just got fed up with craft fairs where all they sold was knitted egg cosies,’ says Claire Brown, co-founder of the Miso Funky Market, the Shangri-La of Glasgow’s growing hipster craft community, which branches out into Edinburgh this month.

Shop - Clothes Swap

MULTICOLOURED SWAP SHOP

Photography: Kate V Robertson Additional research: Diana Kiernander I hate this dress. I bought it in a sweaty panic in the tenth shop I’d run into, after discovering that a boyfriend’s sister’s birthday party was going to be more formal than…